The invention is concerned with the method of production of metal workpieces by a welding equipment, in particular workpieces of highly heat-treated materials and a mechanism for the performance of the method.
The practice is known of producing metal workpieces by welding methods, in particular by the profiling method of building-up welding. Such a method consists in the weld material, usually fed in as rods or endless wire, being deposited in runs layer by layer until the desired geometry of the workpiece is reached. For supporting the liquid molten welding material a metallic prefabricated supporting body is usually employed upon which the first layer of weld material is deposited. Thus, e.g., for a cylindrical workpiece a cylinder is employed as the supporting body. Hence the supporting body determines the general shape of the cross-section of a workpiece which is to be produced. What makes it disadvantageous is that for every workpiece a prefabricated supporting body must correspond geometrically to the workpiece. Since the supporting body is connected metallically to the applied layers of weld material, it must under certain circumstances be removed again.
For supporting the liquid weld material the U.S. Pat. No. 4,775,092 employs a cooled cylindrical roller which acts as a support only until the weld material has solidified. Hence a prefabricated supporting body is no longer necessary. But a decisive disadvantage of this method is that only axially symmetrical workpieces can be produced.
Known mechanisms for the profiling building-up welding of workpieces are capable of producing small and also large and correspondingly heavy workpieces which, however, as regards shape are of relatively simple design, predominently axially symmetrical, or are assembled from such shapes.
The problem of the present invention is therefore to deposit runs of weld material of any, even three-dimensional curved shapes and largely constant quality in a simple way so that workpieces arise of practically any shapes in such a way that no supporting body or special manipulator is necessary for supporting the molten weld material.